


circumstantial

by everytuesday



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Coda, Episode: s04e01 Chapter Fifty-Eight: In Memoriam (Riverdale), Gen, Grief/Mourning, really this is just some vague musings on the betty scene at the graveyard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 18:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21257618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everytuesday/pseuds/everytuesday
Summary: Mourning Fred Andrews is uncomplicated. Mourning Hal Cooper is not.





	circumstantial

Betty watches Archie grieve his father and she feels a sickening longing in her belly. It’s a horrible thing to feel at a time like this, but there’s no space for her to unpack it or to spare much thought on it besides the initial guilt after the longing. She has to be there for Archie and so her feelings run unchecked in the background of her mind.

She envies how easy it is for him. He doesn’t know how easy it is that he gets to mourn his perfect dad. It’s a classic, bittersweet tragedy of a story. Beloved father, gone too soon, leaving behind a grieving son. The town comes together, with a parade in his honor, everyone remembers a good man.

And Betty loves Fred. She has no doubt that Fred deserves his parade and a dozen more. He’d been a good father, not just to Archie but to any kid in need of a little extra paternal support, herself included. Fatherhood was in his DNA,  _ caring  _ was in his DNA. He loved freely and openly anyone who crossed his path. Took gang members in without a second thought. Offered up his house to wayward teens in need of a place to crash, even as his own son was missing. Stopped to help a woman with a flat tire.

Fred was perfect. Grieving him makes sense. It’s easy.

Betty wants what Archie has so much it makes her sick to her stomach.

Her father is dead too, but she can’t grieve Hal without feeling like she might as well be spitting in his victims’ faces. Midge. Fred. Moose. Everyone else who had been left hurt or dead in his wake. The town hates Hal Cooper. There’ll be no parades. There wasn’t even a funeral, because Betty didn’t have a mother to help plan it or pay for it. The process was shuffled along, taken care of by already-in-place procedures so quickly Betty didn’t even realize Hal had been buried until she saw someone bragging about the first graffiti marks in a social media post.

Betty shouldn’t grieve, but the ugly truth of it was that Hal hadn’t been a bad father all the time. He couldn’t have been. No one ever thought he was capable of what he did, he didn’t walk around town with a big sign over his head that read “I’m secretly a serial killer.” He didn’t kick puppies for fun or--

He didn’t hurt them. She thinks maybe it’d be easier if he had been this transparently awful person the entire time. If he’d only ever been cruel and callous, if she’d spent her life afraid of him instead of loving him.

He was kind. Not the best dad, but he was her dad. He was there. Sometimes she had trusted him more than her mom. He might’ve missed that day at the picnic, but there were other days. He’d taken her to a father-daughter dance in elementary school. He’d proof-read her first newspaper articles. He loved her.

He loved her, didn’t he? It wasn’t all fake. Surely you couldn’t fake loving someone that long.

She can’t ask anyone. Polly’s gone. Her mom is gone. She doesn’t trust herself to ask anyone else. No one else knew him the way the three of them did, they couldn’t be objective about it, though she’s not sure objectivity is possible.

It’s too complicated because sometimes the monster isn’t hiding underneath your bed. Sometimes, the monster tucks you in and sings you to sleep. Sometimes you love the monster and you can’t just turn it off like a switch. It doesn’t go away just because you realize the monster was a monster.

Betty lets herself cry for Fred, but she lets herself cry for Hal too, and no one else needs to know.


End file.
